WASHINGTON () If the 14th Amendment didn’t exist, Connecticut’s attorney general wouldn’t be a United States citizen.
“I’m a birthright citizen. I derive my citizenship on the 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution, like many children of immigrants,” William Tong told outside the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., on Thursday.
The Supreme Court conducted oral arguments in a case involving birthright citizenship, a constitutional right President Donald Trump has pushed to end.
It guarantees citizenship to anyone born in the U.S. As it stands, that includes children of immigrants in the U.S. illegally.
Tong, a Democrat and the first Chinese American attorney general of any state, was born on American soil to Chinese immigrant parents.
“If they [Supreme Court justices] go the opposite way from what we want them to, then it’ll do great damage to the 14th Amendment,” Tong said. “But the 14th Amendment is really clear. The language is really clear. There’s not any ambiguity in the language. And so I think these justices, particularly those that focus on the text, if they just read the text, it says what it says.”
The focus of Thursday’s arguments was on whether lower courts can block the president’s policies.
Trump issued an executive order on the first day of his second term declaring that the 14th Amendment should not automatically extend to everyone in the U.S. Since Jan. 20, multiple states have sued, and lower courts have ruled against the president’s actions.
The justices questioned what would happen if the government were allowed, even temporarily, to deny citizenship to children born to people in the country illegally.
The 14th Amendment became part of the Constitution in 1868. The government argued to the justices that birthright citizenship, at the time, was intended for children of slaves.
Ama Frimpong, a native of Ghana, helped lead an hourslong protest during the arguments.
“Black and brown families are under attack. This administration is doing everything that it can to strip us of protections that we have had for a long period of time,” Frimpong said. “We are here to say we will not let that happen.”
Frimpong is the legal director for CASA, a national organization that provides services to immigrants and their families. CASA is one of the parties in the SCOTUS case.
“As an immigrant myself who has lived the life of being undocumented, being an undocumented child in this country afraid, I don’t want any other child to live that life,” Frimpong said. “We are in a country where the law is very clear. That for children who are born here, they don’t have to live in that fear, so why change that?”
Protesters, including Alex Vasquez, withstood the D.C. heat from morning to afternoon.
Vasquez, the director of organizing for CASA Maryland, immigrated from Mexico with his parents when he was a child. His sister, now a naturalized citizen, will soon give birth.
“The impact for many of us who do this work is really understanding that a lot of people come to this country having to navigate a cruel immigration system,” Vasquez said. “But still choosing to move forward here, establishing a new family, establishing a new generation of children who are born here, and for us, it’s personal.”
